Looks like there's a few things that can be blowing up inside the ole Box of X. Graphic cards, and also the heat sinks
My Home Theatre equipment guy started doing XBox repairs on commission not to long ago. He just put out a DIY guide for fixing XBox, mostly for if the problem is a heatsink.
Theory of the failure
The common consensus of the cause of the 'red ring of death (RROD)' and 'no video' problems is that there are two main chips on the circuit board of the Xbox that overheat and lift off the PC board. These chips are glued onto the PC board, and each chip has 64 or 128 contact points on the underside of the chip. These contact points are not accessible, as they are directly under the chip.
Over time, heat buildup causes the PC board to warp slightly, and if even one of the contact points between the chip and PC board is broken, the RROD occurs, the box freezes, or you get a black screen with no video.
The Cure
It's pretty common knowledge that the 'X' shaped clamps that hold the heatsinks to the chips cause the warping of the PC board, so the common cure is to replace the spring loaded X clamps with bolts to provide more even pressure between the chip and PC board. Over time however, the PC board will continue to warp slightly, and the failure may return after a few hours, weeks or months of game play. Some Xboxes appear to be permanently repaired and do not fail again after the first repair.
We here also put the multispeed fans into full speed mode which makes the Xbox a bit noisier, but the Xbox runs cooler, and we also modify the air ducting within the unit to redirect more air over the video processor chip, that seems to run hotter than the main CPU.
The Re-Repair
We have found that most re-repairs simply consist of changing the tension of the bolts that hold the heatsinks in place, to change the pressure between the chip and the PC board. Here's how to do that:
People do sit pretty far back. But HD is 1920x1080. Raise your hand if you have a computer monitor that high
Interesting story...
My fiance's father, has a home theatre setup-- an analog projector throwing a 102" picture. He's also an avid/addicted WoW player. When he replaced his dinky old computer with a new one, I made sure he got a good enough video card, and hooked the computer up to the projector.
It works out great for mpgs we want to watch, but not so much for Warcraft. It looks great, don't get me wrong, but as it turns out...
He needs glasses to read, but not to see things that are far away. The screen is far enough away that he doesn't need them-- but the keyboard isn't. He (still) hasn't learned to touch type-- 100% hunt'n'peck. So he'd have to put on his glasses, use the keyboard, take them off, look up, repeat. Top it off with him saying that the screen is too big, and that he can't see everything (health, map, avatar, enemy) all at once.
So he invested in a 22" widescreen monitor instead, and we have the computer dual-weilding the displays so that he can WoW on the monitor, and at other times we can watch a movie on the screen
SRI International, a nonprofit research and development organization, has developed a new technology that enables some robots to scale walls.
Sweet suckling Vishnu, that's disturbing if combined with this 'bot. It's already creepy enough to think that a roboboss can come lurking up to check in on me-- but to have it descend from it's perch on the ceiling? Uhg!
Interesting list. There's a couple things I've noticed:
* Adult Material (see Mature Audiences)
My father sells a lot of memorabilia on ebay. Most of it is sports related, but he also gets Playmates autographs on occasion. Reecently, eBay's been pulling some of his magazines and pictures, saying that they will not accept listings of Playboys published after 1984. I guess that's their "class art/porn" cutoff date.
* Hazardous, Restricted, and Perishable Items - examples include batteries, fireworks, and Freon
I call wtf on that. I've purchased laptop batteries many times on eBay.
The main strength of a verification like this would have to be genetic diversity. If every page used the same javascript to checksum, then it would be trivial for a monkey at the ISP to figure out that they need to run the script's
if ( ! CheckSum( PageWithoutChecksum(this)) == EmbeddedChecksum(this)) ) {alert("baaaad");)
And replace the checksum block with CheckSum(PageWithoutChecksum(ALTERED PAGE))
Same goes for just stripping out the javascript line altogether, or replacing if (!...) with if(...).
But if every page implemented a different variant of this type of check, with different function names, signatures, structures, if...else blocks, and CheckSum algorithms-- well, at that point it would be darn near impossible for the ISP to keep up with every single possible variant
How quick to react / adapt is a movie studio to making a horrible, horrible movie? Do they learn from the process and apply the lessons to the next pic, or is every movie created in isolation of the other?
This could (though I won't say will) be a chance to do something new and interesting with the genre-- something that is much closer to the "interactive movie" that gets buzzed around so much. It works like this:
Make the game a living world. That is, events in-game end up changing the game world... the landscape, politics, society, etc. Except that MMOs can't seem to have a single server, right? Not a problem.
The devs plan out world-changing quests/events/whatever. Except that they need to be designed to be very open-ended. There should be several ways that the event CAN unfold. It will be up to how the players handle the quest as to determine the exact way it will unfold.
This event gets run over and over in different instances over different servers. At the end of the "event"'s time period, the most popular/interesting/well done/etc version takes effect, and the world changes.
Now, as a player, how can you tell wtf just happened. In your instance, you killed Queen Zxxyrx. Why is it that the world says she escaped and founded a new island off the coast of Grak? How did that happen? What does it mean?
Enter the TV show. You take the framework of the dev's game design as the basis for that week's episode. You flesh it out with the actions of the in-game players. Like any adaptation, some things will change. The dialog will have to be translated from 1337 into English, and edited for content / dramatic effect. It could event be that the character's actions are transposed onto recurring TV show characters. (Instead of luvs2spwg driving off Queen Zxxyrx, Sir Weekly the Recognizable does it)
And that's how you do it. Every week, present a challenge. The players who overcome it in the most impressive / creative / unique / dramatic / any other criteria way that week not only get a chance to change the world, but their deeds will be adapted for TV. Throw in a bunch of in-game references that gamers will get (but non-gamers won't go wtf over), and voila. TV show.
Want to be able to ship many movies on a single disc... but that doesn't seem to be happening
Yeah, that's not ever happening until there's some serious housecleaning in the marketing department.
Masters of Horror was a series that was 13 1-hour episodes. Each episode was a different anthology-esque tale told by a different horror movie director. Because it was so diverse, not every fan liked the same episodes. But they liked the series overall. The 13th episode was ultra violent, and was either never aired (or heavily censored), creating a huge demand for that episode
The market is primed to release the season on DVD, including the "banned" episode. The fans had pretty much unanimously said that they'd buy it for that episode, plus their two or three "favorite" episodes, and to have the entire season.
Instead, marketing splits it up into single or double episode DVDs, pricing them at over $20 each. And they don't release the "banned" episode (or only release it censored
Fans DON'T buy the DVD, and make their motives clear. They'd have to buy 2-3 discs for $60 just to get the episodes they really want. They were expecting to spend $40-$55 on an entire season of 13 episodes, inline with other shows. The episode they really wanted isn't available. The DVD sales are dismal, and you can find the series in the 2/$5 at most video stores
Here comes the victor in the HD wars. BlueRay. Alright, let's get these movie-quality episodes out in HD. There's still a huge demand for it, after all.
What happens? Season 1 is released in FOUR VOLUMES! 3 episodes per disc, and close to $40 each. And they're again split up in such a way that most fans would have to buy 2 or 3 of them to get all their wanted episodes.
Even putting aside the insanity of releasing in parts when it epic-failed before-- they're putting less than 3 hours of SD quality footage on one high-capacity disc. You can practically HEAR the empty, wasted space. The entire season would have fit handsomely on one or two BlueRay discs, which could have been sold in a single package to the hungry fans. But it didn't happen. The series will go unbought-- and there's 2-3 times as much wasted packaging and plastic hanging around.
So until marketing execs can be convinced that "Season 1 vol 1" is a bankruptable offense, getting "Hellraiser: The Complete Collection" on a single BlueRay ain't happening.
Though, PS3 sales have gone up about 10%. This is due mostly to tons of people saying "OK, BlueRay is now the thing. But BlueRay players themselves are expensive an unreliable. The PS3 is a BlueRay player that isn't the much more expensive than a dedicated player, and has some nice home theater things built in. So if you're going to drop a couple hundred or more on a player, you might just as well buy a PS3. That way, not only do you get a BlueRay-- you get a PS3 too."
I know it worked for my fiance's father. He has a very nice home theater setup (projector, big screen, surround, etc). Just after Christmas, he bought into HDDVD. A week later the format was killed off. So, wanting to stay HD-current, he took the advise of his Home Theater forum and bought a PS3. Not that I mind-- GTAIV and Rock Band on a 102" screen is pretty sweet.
Anything more and you've got to overlap the diagrams to a degree that it becomes unreadable. Until I get a 75' monitor, this is going to be a problem.
And there's the issue. The only time I ever found UML useful in the context of an entire system was when I had a 20' long whiteboard at my disposal. The team and I were trying to figure out just exactly how the hell the system we were designing was going to work. What classes / associations / attributes did we need? We each grabbed a different color marker, and drew what we thought worked. Then we took a step back, talked about it (pointing out and circling as needed)-- then wiped out what didn't work and kept going.
After that we sketched out a pen-based copy that had the pertinents, and went on to coding. I think we referred to the pen stuff once or twice.
As a designing tool, it was fine. As a documentation or coding tool, it would have sucked. It would have taken hours, if not days, to create that diagram in Rose, and we'd never have been able to collaborate on it, nor see the entire system laid out before us.
I finally settled for a couple twisty bulbs, but I'm not too happy about it because they contain mercury
Oh, please. There's more mercury in your watch battery than in the CFL. And it's not like its posing any actual danger to you. The mercury isn't released into the air when the CFL is broken. If it does break, you can clean it up with a vacuum and a pair of rubber gloves, just like a non-CFL. No need to call in a hazmat team.
Unless you're going to get down on the floor and lick up the broken CFL, it doesn't pose much a risk to you.
Environmentally, the tiny bit of mercury is far outweighed by the massive energy usage and packaging savings the CFL gives you over its life time. The CFL can either be disposed of with your paints and batteries (ie: safely), or some places even have CFL recycling programs to reclaim the materials.
Ultimately, that is what will get them in the end: the judges. Changes to the law are slow, but the unspoken consensus of the judges isn't. They're supposed to be unbiased arbitrators, which means they everyone gets a fair shake to prove themselves. However, it works when you prove yourself to be a scummy, annoying, lying, untrustworthy entity-- well-- you can't be biased against the truth.;)
I don't normally respond to AC, but this needs to be pointed out.
The only difference is that homosexuality can be lived out between consenting adults, while pedophilia cannot.
However, current society treats pedophiles (and i'm talking about pedophiles, not rapists) like they already committed a crime.
Because they have. You said it yourself, right there. A child cannot give consent for sex, because a child is not physically or emotionally mature enough to handle the concept. Having sex with someone without their consent is a crime, just as physically forcing or drugging an adult would be.
Slashdot Mirror
Including Jon Stewart. I'm looking forward to tonight's Daily Show.
AMENDMENT XXIV
[insert text of Project Gutenberg here]
Looks like there's a few things that can be blowing up inside the ole Box of X. Graphic cards, and also the heat sinks
My Home Theatre equipment guy started doing XBox repairs on commission not to long ago. He just put out a DIY guide for fixing XBox, mostly for if the problem is a heatsink.
(Instructions and several pictures follow)
http://www.curtpalme.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10957
Interesting story...
My fiance's father, has a home theatre setup-- an analog projector throwing a 102" picture. He's also an avid/addicted WoW player. When he replaced his dinky old computer with a new one, I made sure he got a good enough video card, and hooked the computer up to the projector.
It works out great for mpgs we want to watch, but not so much for Warcraft. It looks great, don't get me wrong, but as it turns out...
He needs glasses to read, but not to see things that are far away. The screen is far enough away that he doesn't need them-- but the keyboard isn't. He (still) hasn't learned to touch type-- 100% hunt'n'peck. So he'd have to put on his glasses, use the keyboard, take them off, look up, repeat. Top it off with him saying that the screen is too big, and that he can't see everything (health, map, avatar, enemy) all at once.
So he invested in a 22" widescreen monitor instead, and we have the computer dual-weilding the displays so that he can WoW on the monitor, and at other times we can watch a movie on the screen
Just repeat to yourself, "It's just a show, I should really just relax..."
Why not: Universe newUniverse = new Universe(this)
The US Gov't.
Standing vigilant, -Slashdot
Military shit. Move along, citizen.
And only one to charlie foxtrot
Sweet suckling Vishnu, that's disturbing if combined with this 'bot. It's already creepy enough to think that a roboboss can come lurking up to check in on me-- but to have it descend from it's perch on the ceiling? Uhg!
Stairs, motherfucker. Stairs.
Interesting list. There's a couple things I've noticed:
My father sells a lot of memorabilia on ebay. Most of it is sports related, but he also gets Playmates autographs on occasion. Reecently, eBay's been pulling some of his magazines and pictures, saying that they will not accept listings of Playboys published after 1984. I guess that's their "class art/porn" cutoff date.
I call wtf on that. I've purchased laptop batteries many times on eBay.
I pine for the days when I used a mail reader called pine...
The main strength of a verification like this would have to be genetic diversity. If every page used the same javascript to checksum, then it would be trivial for a monkey at the ISP to figure out that they need to run the script's
And replace the checksum block with CheckSum(PageWithoutChecksum(ALTERED PAGE))
Same goes for just stripping out the javascript line altogether, or replacing if (!...) with if(...).
But if every page implemented a different variant of this type of check, with different function names, signatures, structures, if...else blocks, and CheckSum algorithms-- well, at that point it would be darn near impossible for the ISP to keep up with every single possible variant
Ah. Rifts.
How quick to react / adapt is a movie studio to making a horrible, horrible movie? Do they learn from the process and apply the lessons to the next pic, or is every movie created in isolation of the other?
This could (though I won't say will) be a chance to do something new and interesting with the genre-- something that is much closer to the "interactive movie" that gets buzzed around so much. It works like this:
Make the game a living world. That is, events in-game end up changing the game world... the landscape, politics, society, etc. Except that MMOs can't seem to have a single server, right? Not a problem.
The devs plan out world-changing quests/events/whatever. Except that they need to be designed to be very open-ended. There should be several ways that the event CAN unfold. It will be up to how the players handle the quest as to determine the exact way it will unfold.
This event gets run over and over in different instances over different servers. At the end of the "event"'s time period, the most popular/interesting/well done/etc version takes effect, and the world changes.
Now, as a player, how can you tell wtf just happened. In your instance, you killed Queen Zxxyrx. Why is it that the world says she escaped and founded a new island off the coast of Grak? How did that happen? What does it mean?
Enter the TV show. You take the framework of the dev's game design as the basis for that week's episode. You flesh it out with the actions of the in-game players. Like any adaptation, some things will change. The dialog will have to be translated from 1337 into English, and edited for content / dramatic effect. It could event be that the character's actions are transposed onto recurring TV show characters. (Instead of luvs2spwg driving off Queen Zxxyrx, Sir Weekly the Recognizable does it)
And that's how you do it. Every week, present a challenge. The players who overcome it in the most impressive / creative / unique / dramatic / any other criteria way that week not only get a chance to change the world, but their deeds will be adapted for TV. Throw in a bunch of in-game references that gamers will get (but non-gamers won't go wtf over), and voila. TV show.
Yeah, that's not ever happening until there's some serious housecleaning in the marketing department.
Masters of Horror was a series that was 13 1-hour episodes. Each episode was a different anthology-esque tale told by a different horror movie director. Because it was so diverse, not every fan liked the same episodes. But they liked the series overall. The 13th episode was ultra violent, and was either never aired (or heavily censored), creating a huge demand for that episode
The market is primed to release the season on DVD, including the "banned" episode. The fans had pretty much unanimously said that they'd buy it for that episode, plus their two or three "favorite" episodes, and to have the entire season.
Instead, marketing splits it up into single or double episode DVDs, pricing them at over $20 each. And they don't release the "banned" episode (or only release it censored
Fans DON'T buy the DVD, and make their motives clear. They'd have to buy 2-3 discs for $60 just to get the episodes they really want. They were expecting to spend $40-$55 on an entire season of 13 episodes, inline with other shows. The episode they really wanted isn't available. The DVD sales are dismal, and you can find the series in the 2/$5 at most video stores
Here comes the victor in the HD wars. BlueRay. Alright, let's get these movie-quality episodes out in HD. There's still a huge demand for it, after all.
What happens? Season 1 is released in FOUR VOLUMES! 3 episodes per disc, and close to $40 each. And they're again split up in such a way that most fans would have to buy 2 or 3 of them to get all their wanted episodes.
Even putting aside the insanity of releasing in parts when it epic-failed before-- they're putting less than 3 hours of SD quality footage on one high-capacity disc. You can practically HEAR the empty, wasted space. The entire season would have fit handsomely on one or two BlueRay discs, which could have been sold in a single package to the hungry fans. But it didn't happen. The series will go unbought-- and there's 2-3 times as much wasted packaging and plastic hanging around.
So until marketing execs can be convinced that "Season 1 vol 1" is a bankruptable offense, getting "Hellraiser: The Complete Collection" on a single BlueRay ain't happening.
Though, PS3 sales have gone up about 10%. This is due mostly to tons of people saying "OK, BlueRay is now the thing. But BlueRay players themselves are expensive an unreliable. The PS3 is a BlueRay player that isn't the much more expensive than a dedicated player, and has some nice home theater things built in. So if you're going to drop a couple hundred or more on a player, you might just as well buy a PS3. That way, not only do you get a BlueRay-- you get a PS3 too."
I know it worked for my fiance's father. He has a very nice home theater setup (projector, big screen, surround, etc). Just after Christmas, he bought into HDDVD. A week later the format was killed off. So, wanting to stay HD-current, he took the advise of his Home Theater forum and bought a PS3. Not that I mind-- GTAIV and Rock Band on a 102" screen is pretty sweet.
And there's the issue. The only time I ever found UML useful in the context of an entire system was when I had a 20' long whiteboard at my disposal. The team and I were trying to figure out just exactly how the hell the system we were designing was going to work. What classes / associations / attributes did we need? We each grabbed a different color marker, and drew what we thought worked. Then we took a step back, talked about it (pointing out and circling as needed)-- then wiped out what didn't work and kept going.
After that we sketched out a pen-based copy that had the pertinents, and went on to coding. I think we referred to the pen stuff once or twice.
As a designing tool, it was fine. As a documentation or coding tool, it would have sucked. It would have taken hours, if not days, to create that diagram in Rose, and we'd never have been able to collaborate on it, nor see the entire system laid out before us.
Fixed. Thanks. ;)
Oh, please. There's more mercury in your watch battery than in the CFL. And it's not like its posing any actual danger to you. The mercury isn't released into the air when the CFL is broken. If it does break, you can clean it up with a vacuum and a pair of rubber gloves, just like a non-CFL. No need to call in a hazmat team.
Unless you're going to get down on the floor and lick up the broken CFL, it doesn't pose much a risk to you.
Environmentally, the tiny bit of mercury is far outweighed by the massive energy usage and packaging savings the CFL gives you over its life time. The CFL can either be disposed of with your paints and batteries (ie: safely), or some places even have CFL recycling programs to reclaim the materials.
Take a gander at the Natural Resources Canada FAQ about CFLs. It includes a link to a health study about the effects of CFL's mercury.
Ultimately, that is what will get them in the end: the judges. Changes to the law are slow, but the unspoken consensus of the judges isn't. They're supposed to be unbiased arbitrators, which means they everyone gets a fair shake to prove themselves. However, it works when you prove yourself to be a scummy, annoying, lying, untrustworthy entity-- well-- you can't be biased against the truth. ;)
I don't normally respond to AC, but this needs to be pointed out.
Because they have. You said it yourself, right there. A child cannot give consent for sex, because a child is not physically or emotionally mature enough to handle the concept. Having sex with someone without their consent is a crime, just as physically forcing or drugging an adult would be.